The Dapper Don of American Letters: Gay Talese

I hadn’t been in the living room of Gay Talese’s East Side brownstone more than 10 minutes before he said, “You wouldn’t go to a wedding or a job interview dressed like that, would you?” Probably not. I was wearing a puffy Dodger-blue hoodie over a dress shirt. Did Talese equate our author-writer conversation with the formality of occasions such as a wedding? Probably so, and he’s long regarded sartorial style as a sign of respect. 

“When I go to interview someone,” he tells me, “I always felt I was representing myself as a professional and I had to dress the part. It’s a sense of separateness, not protection; a sense of self and pride. Most people will dress for a funeral. I dress for being alive, not being dead. I always dressed as well as the people I was interviewing, if not better. I dressed as if I was meeting the pope.” 

Fortunately, Talese, 92, values manners as much as style. As we sat in the living room of the home he’s lived in with his wife, the venerated book editor and publisher Nan Talese, since the late 1950s, he thoughtfully answered questions about writers I knew he admired, such as John O’Hara and Irwin Shaw. 

Born in 1932, the son of a tailor, off the boat from Italy, Talese grew up in the white-bread seaside town of Ocean City, New Jersey. Talese’s immigrant background explains the edge he brought to his profession, a writing career that catapulted him from The New York Times to Esquire and, eventually, the bestseller list, which brought him fame, fortune, and perhaps a sense that he’s always been under- appreciated as a writer. 

I always dressed as well as the people I interviewed. Most people will dress for a funeral. I dress for being alive. 

Talese got his sense of style from his parents. His father, whom he refers to as the “James Salter of tailors”, made suits for himself and his son. But it was Talese’s mother — “a beautiful and beautifully dressed woman” — who was the family breadwinner. “Fashion was imperative in my family,” says Talese, who helped in his mother’s store as an adolescent, and where he learned the invaluable reportorial skills of listening and observing. Talese had a column in the local paper when he was 15 — “I was a public persona even as a kid”. He attended the University of Alabama, then joined the Times in the mid 1950s. He started as a copyboy, became a sports reporter, and felt like a perpetual outsider. An early letter from Harold Hayes, the editor of Esquire, was addressed to “Miss Gay Talese”. 

As a young, hungry reporter for the Times, Talese grew frustrated by the creative limitations of writing for a newspaper. He didn’t want to write fiction — the world had enough great novelists — but aimed to elevate magazine journalism to the realm of literature by applying the techniques of fiction — scenes, character, dialogue, inner-monologue — to reporting. In the pages of Esquire, he helped pioneer what his friend Tom Wolfe later dubbed ‘New Journalism’. Influenced by the short stories of Guy de Maupassant and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Talese burned to bring that level of artistry to non-fiction. 

His technique wasn’t to just interview subjects but to hang around them, for hours, days, even weeks, immersing himself in their world. He called it the art of hanging out. “I’m one of those who believe that reporting is an art form,” he once said, “or should be pursued as an art form. You can do anything with it. My interest in reporting is never go to the spokesman, never go to the official source, never go to the elected official, the authority. Forget the expert; ignore him. Go to the person who is on the receiving end of whatever you’re talking about, someone who might represent the minority point of view, which is never adequately expressed.” 

Talese wrote about anonymous people, such as the men who built the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, and Alden Whitman, an eccentric man who wrote obituaries at the Times. His first anthology, Fame and Obscurity, included portraits of celebrities like boxing champions Joe Louis and Floyd Patterson, the latter displaying vulnerability uncommon to an athlete in describing what it’s like to get knocked out in the ring. Talese tended to befriend his subjects, though he wasn’t soft or uncritical, as is evident in profiles of the theatre director Joshua Logan and journalist George Plimpton. Talese, a serious-minded man, had fun profiling Peter O’Toole in 1963, whom he interviewed in London and Dublin. “One time, Peter asked me if I was married,” Talese says. “I said, ‘Yes, I am’. He asked, ‘Do you have any children?’ I told him we didn’t because I wasn’t making much money and it’s expensive to raise a child. ‘You’re probably not a risk-taker,’ he said. ‘I have a three-year-old daughter named Kate.’ I asked what he meant, and he told me I shouldn’t worry about it, just do it. We were in Dublin at the time, and when we returned to London he said, ‘Why don’t you have Nan come to London and stay with us for a couple of days?’ Which she did. We stayed in his guest room, and that’s where our first daughter was conceived.”

Talese’s most celebrated magazine story is the 1966 profile ‘Frank Sinatra Has a Cold’, which has grown in stature over the years, in part because it is held up as the quintessential write-around (he never interviewed Sinatra, just hung around his circle); because Sinatra is still recognised today; and not insignificantly because the title is catchy as hell. The same year he profiled another Italian American idol from the recent past, the baseball player Joe DiMaggio, a star in the 1930s and forties who became even more legendary as Mr. Marilyn Monroe for a period in the fifties. (This story appeared four years after Monroe’s death and a year before DiMaggio made his way back into the public consciousness as a lyric in the Simon and Garfunkel song Mrs. Robinson (“Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?”). 

Read the full story in Issue 95, available now.

Photo Credits: Getty Images